Fascists Under Beds

One of the signs that a political movement may be approaching terminal decline is when its more excitable elements begin to see “fascism” where none exists. A common hallucination is that liberals and other democratic-left reformers are actually fascists, whether they know it or not. This was routine in certain precincts of the left for much of the twentieth century. During the nineteen-twenties and thirties the Comintern and its franchisees took the line that social democrats and the like were “social fascists.” During the Johnson and Nixon years, loony lefties deployed the fascist label not only against Republicans but also against Democrats and other weak sisters deemed insufficiently this or that. Remember “The Fascist Insect That Preys Upon The Life Of The People”? That was everybody outside the two or three ill-furnished Bay Area apartments rented by members of the “Symbionese Liberation Army.” On the loony right, the equivalent of calling liberals fascists used to be calling liberals communists. That custom lives on among Republicans in the relatively benign form of accusing Democrats of being akin to “European socialists” or just “Europeans,” or wanting the United States to be more like “Western Europe”—a theme I touch on in this week’s Comment. But these accusations lack punch, somehow. The problem is, too many Americans have actually been to Western Europe, and it didn’t scare them. Lately the right has picked up where the Comintern left off. “Liberal fascism” (the title of a book by Jonah Goldberg, of National Review) is “social fascism” updated by ideologues for whom Rush is the new Russia. The meme seems to be catching on. Consider Michael Ledeen, the well-known philosopher-skulker of the shadowy right. He explains to readers of Pajamas Media that “what Obama et. al. are doing” is not socialism, because socialism requires “the abolition of private property.” (Never mind that by that definition, not a single European socialist is a socialist.) What is it, then, that Obama et. al. are doing? Class? Anybody? That’s right: “It’s fascism.” Nobody dares call it that, though, Ledeen complains, because “lots of the people writing about current events” like what Obama’s doing. Therefore, they “wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that ‘f’ epithet.” And what is fascism, according to Ledeen? Better cover the children’s ears: it’s “an expansion of the state’s role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business.” That’s it. Nothing about that other stuff—stuff like blood-and-soil nationalism, dictatorship, leader-worship, jackboots, militarism, goose-stepping, concentration camps. That’s why there was no essential difference between F.D.R. and Mussolini. Ledeen:

Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t cure America’s economic ills any more than Mussolini’s Third Way did. In both countries, however, its most durable consequence was the expansion of the ability of the state to give orders to more and more citizens, in more and more corners of their lives.

Nor is there any essential difference between Mussolini and Obama. Both, after all, favor “regulation of business.” Now, I don’t want to make a Ledeen-like mistake by insisting that today’s rightist crazies are exactly the same as yesterday’s leftist crazies simply because both have equated liberalism with fascism. There is at least one important difference. Jonah Goldberg is an editor and writer at National Review, the leading journal of supposedly mainstream conservatism, and his writing has appeared in equally respectable venues. Michael Ledeen served in the Reagan Administration as a consultant to the N.S.C. and the Defense Department and as a “special adviser” to the Secretary of State Alexander Haig; during the Bush Junior years he was a powerful inside influence in pushing for war in Iraq and elsewhere. He has meanwhile occupied comfortable perches at conservative think tanks, most prominently as the “Freedom Scholar” at the American Enterprise Institute. By contrast, the lefties who cried “fascism” were marginal cranks, without the slightest influence in the Democratic Party or any Democratic Administration. (H/t: S.B.)

Hendrik Hertzberg is a senior editor and staff writer at The New Yorker. He regularly blogs about politics.